Well, so level 3 can be safe under certain conditions and still be world changing.
For example, imagine a self driving truck that works perfectly, but only during the day, on highways, when it is not raining.
Such a system would still put millions out of work, as firing half of the truck drivers is possible if something works when it is sunny, on the highway.
In the physical world there's no such thing as a system with preconditions that can "work perfectly". There will always be a boundary region where is is hard to say whether the precondition is present and the system is unpredictable.
What we really mean when we say a system is reliable/perfect is that the conditions which can cause failure are so rare that they can be neglected. Any system that depends on things that are inside normal experience: rain, day/night, errant pedestrians, earthquakes, and so on can never be trusted to act reliably/perfectly. A "reliable" system might be excused for messing up under conditions such as meteor strikes or falling space stations.
There is going to be a higher threshold of self-driving vehicles, because random accidents by random people is not narrative-inspiring but for self-driving vehicles all accidents will be the fault of The Corporation. Every single individual accident will be the focus of world media fascination and speculation to derive how the motives of the corporation's singular supermind chose to allow it to happen, which will turn out to be that it was too greedy, scheming, uncaring, lazy, etc. There will be intense focus on a trickle of rare accidents because they are caused by a powerful corporate overmind that is potentially betraying us all, and little interest in a greater number of random accidents caused by no one of particular recognition for no discernable reason. Which is exactly what we've seen so far.
> random accidents by random people is not narrative-inspiring but for self-driving vehicles all accidents will be the fault of The Corporation
I think we can conclude, absent conditions of wilful neglect, that this hypothesis is false. I thought this, too. But people are reacting reasonably to Tesla and Uber’s, erm, faux pas.
I'm inclined to say "too reasonably" given the fact that the statistics seem to imply a much higher risk from the self-driving software than a human driver (Uber doesn't have many miles driven and Tesla is using overall-telsa statistics to hide the auto-pilot statistics).
Imagine if instead of saying the word "perfectly" I said "works better than humans".
Do you reject the idea that there are situations, such as sunny highways, that are much much easier than everything else? And that if we can solve this much easier problem, it would still be world changing?
Why couldnt that be trusted to work better than humans? It is a much easier problem.
One person's pedant is another person's clear conscience. There's massive disagreement in the self-driving debate as to the extent to which we are dealing with safety critical systems. As you can no doubt tell, I'm firmly on the safety critical side.
I've a fair bit of experience with designing and shipping critical infrastructure for emergency services. One has to ship, but in my experience the majority of people don't have the necessary eye for detail to make a safe system. This is why we have process: to allow fallible people to ship safe systems (and to avoid delusion in the minority who do have an eye for detail). The self-driving field is still developing their processes, so they have to be conservative with their shipping.
Many of those arguing for self-driving are under estimating the safety of a typical human driver. The bar that a self-driving system has to meet is very high. If conditions are easy for a self-driving car then they are probably easy and safe for a human as well.
Accidents are skewed towards a subset of poor conditions involving speed, alcohol and fatigue. Is it fair to replace a safe driver that avoids speed, alcohol and fatigue with a system that whilst safer than average is still less safe than the specific circumstance?
Maybe an interim use of self-driving technology is to have the person driving, and the self-driving system in a co-driver/critique mode acting as an "unsafe driving detector"?
ome can just look at the state of autonomous robots in industrial plants. they do a handful of functions, they have limited reach and they have predictable patterns and yet when you add humans to the mix all kind of dangerous conditions arise to the point most robots sharing space with humans need to be caged
this is our current state of the art with automation and safety and yet we allow companies to slap a radar and a pretend safety driver and hurl a ton of metal down the pubblic roads
autonomous vehicle will undoubtedly at some point be safer than human, but shortcutting known limitations like radars vs dodging static objects because 'drivers are the backup' is lunacy and the recent deaths are just a symptom of people never having worked in safety system design playing fast and loose with human lifes, and the companies which enable that should be made an example of by courts.
some years ago serious automaker did their analisys and come up with the concept of designing the anticollision system first and use those as a backup to autonomous driving technology, that somehow has been lost in the race for profitability.
"this is our current state of the art with automation and safety and yet we allow companies to slap a radar and a pretend safety driver and hurl a ton of metal down the pubblic roads"
This is what bugs me most: Who on earth ever thought it's a good idea to allow a company like Uber with their history of corner cutting and shady business to test such dangerous technology on public roads?
I’m confused about this hypothetical- when ot starts raining or in any other adverse condition thousands of truck loads are just parked and delayed until it improves? I don’t see how this would put anyone out of work.
Imagine this on the highway in the desert. Is it ever going to start raining then?
Or imagine if you just look up the weather ahead of time and only run the self driving trucks if there is a less than 5% chance of rain.
These situations are still very common. You could replace all trucks on the highway in any desert climate, for example. And that's still many billions of dollars.
What's the point of a technology that only works under the least challenging conditions, that is probably less than one percent of the actual occurring conditions - and where the current solution, human beings, work better anyway because they don't have to stop for rain?
What you're imagining is a car on a fixed track - a railcar. We already have trains but the US does need to build out their railway, yeah.
Because it is not 1% of circumstances. It would be more like 50% of circumstances.
There are lots of places where it is sunny, and not raining and it is daytime.
Just don't run the trucks on self driving mode during the other times where they don't work, and we could still save up to 50% in labor costs.
Obviously, though, the market for self driving taxis is different than for self driving trucks, but once again, we could just only use them for trucks and still save Trillions.
That wasn't convincing. Obviously someone else (or a machine) would have to load/unload. Sure there will be routes that doesn't automate well, where the destination don't have the knowledge or scale for taking care of loading etc. but for the most parts it would be trivial compared to getting the truck to drive.
I’ve done quite a bit of inventory manual work during college/university Holliday’s and even with such a limited experience I can’t even begin to explain how wrong you are because it would go on for hours.
In a neighbor country wich is pretty much considered as a leader in industrial automation (Germany) it’s almost mandatory for engineers to experience months of low level jobs to get a grasp of what practical real world problems are when working.
This is pure Silicon Valley overconfidence. Software "move fast and break things" approach really don’t translate well for hardware. And in this case I think Uber will learn this lesson the hard way.
All I said was that the act of loading/unloading etc. would be done by different people than the truck driver.
Also, we already have semi-automated warehouses, it is not unimaginable that the drones driving around with boxes could be adapted to able to help load a truck. Probably with the help of another machine. Not saying that this process needs to be void of any human at all - just that the truck driver wouldn't be part of it.
I really didn't say that the inventory work would just disappear - it would just be moved from the truck driver.
Well first research field of automated warehouse is hudge and so it’s very reductive to think that what happens after the truck is the easiest part.
Secondly truck driver usually are in charge of the final delivery to shop or customer and have to deliver good to buildings that are not by any mean standardized.
Having a human on board that know how to operate the truck and how to properly unload it is a feature that will probably be missed out. As It would be pretty unwise IMHO to rely on external people to "not fuck up" when handling heavy objects around a costly automated truck.
So maybe I am totally wrong, but if we concentrate our current R&D on building expensive automated truck so that we can reduce cost by firing driver... Instead of focusing our R&D on producing more economic and ecological truck and alternative transportation... we might as well be fucked up as a specie.
Well, obviously the truck driver won't be in charge of the final delivery, and if the buildings are not by any mean standardized then don't use an automated truck or do standardize that location. Simple as that.
> As It would be pretty unwise IMHO to rely on external people to "not fuck up" when handling heavy objects around a costly automated truck.
I agree that this will be an issue and the people on the ground would need to be educated. But I hope you don't think this problem is unsolvable in practice. We somehow do it for aircrafts (I don't think the pilot does the actual leg work there).
Again that’s nor simple neither cost effective by any mean. Your are dealing with a lot of externalities here.
Logistics is a chain, you can’t replace a link and expect that the others will magically adapt to the new element. It’s like an API you can’t expect users to be happy if you break all compatibility for the sake of progress. And again for API only software have to be adapted which is far easier than hardware.
I don’t doubt than sometimes in the future when all the caveheats will have been addressed and that some standard will have been defined yes you will have automated trucks. But it’s not simple and I don’t see them comming before at least 15 years and in any case after passengers automated cars.
If the economics don't work out, don't do it. This won't be an over night transformation but rather decades. You start where the circumstances are beneficial.
Perhaps the first to adopt this would be postal services and large stores with many outlets throughout a country with their own trucks that do the same route every day. They have control over each destination and it would most likely be easier work alongside existing logistics and everything is kept within the same company.
On that we agree I was just pointing out that it’s not as simple as you initialy thought.
And sorry if I’ve being boring it’s a deformation from Geography my first scholarship. Geographers tends to focus on systemic interaction rather than on individual components.
I’ve been pretty convinced for a while that this is effectively how it will play out. Effectively the “iRobot” model of designated areas/highways that are autonomous and highly controlled/protected and surface streets will remain human controlled for a long time.
For example, imagine a self driving truck that works perfectly, but only during the day, on highways, when it is not raining.
LOL. The other day I was in Mexico on a cave diving trip. It rained, short sudden downpour, out of nowhere. The carnage on the highway just in the few miles from the dive shop to the cenote was insane. No fair-weather robot would stand a chance in those conditions.
For example, imagine a self driving truck that works perfectly, but only during the day, on highways, when it is not raining.
Such a system would still put millions out of work, as firing half of the truck drivers is possible if something works when it is sunny, on the highway.